Opinion: Ministers must tread lightly with telecom industry

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault makes his way to his first cabinet meeting on Thursday November 21, 2019 on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.Peter Menzies is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and a former CRTC vice-chair of telecommunications. While he also advises tech companies, the opinions here are his own.

But we have a minority government. That means framing sensible new legislation involving broadcasting will be a delicate matter because when a cultural discussion happens in Canada, language politics become involved, which means the issue of Quebec’s cultural autonomy comes up.

Mr. Guilbeault will be very aware that one of his predecessors and colleagues, Montreal MP and now Economic Development and Languages Minister Melanie Joly, waswhen her 2017 deal with Netflix failed to carve out a specific piece of the Netflix pie for francophone production in Quebec. That regulators and legislators would frame the internet as little more than the new cable betrays a very poor understanding of what is now the country’s most vital communications tool. The Federal Court, upheld by the Supreme Court in 2012, has already ruled that internet service providers are not broadcasting distribution units , and yet this notion – reminiscent of when automobiles were called “horseless carriages” – persists.

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